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Thursday, January 31, 2013

Business Card Design Using CSS, cont.

You might remember an earlier post of mine in which I showed how to design your business card using some CSS. Converting the designs to printable images wasn't as straight-forward as I had hoped initially. I ended up zooming them up in my web browser and simply taking screengrabs. Thankfully I have a high resolution monitor to use.

I think a HTML to SVG converter might be another option. WebVector is an example of such. I have not given it a go personally but it might be an interesting alternative. I had no idea you could convert HTML to SVG.

I used a local printshop for the first round of cards. 30 cards cost me around 30 euros so it wasn't entirely cheap. They do print bigger series (think 400) quite affordably but we didn't need that much. As 30 wasn't enough I ordered the rest via Moo.

I have had good experiences with Moo before and this case wasn't an exception. In fact I accidentally forgot to flip other side of my card so they did that for me. The user interface has been designed horizontal layouts in mind so it was an easy thing to miss. I hope they fix this later on.

100 normal sized cards cost me around 18 euros (+ postage). The quality was great as expected. Bigger amounts are comparatively cheaper of course. I've grown fond of their minicards. And they are about to introduce NFC based alternative in the near future for the geekiest of us.

If you want to check out Moo, consider using my affiliate link. It will give you a nice 10% discount for your first order. They have other discounts going on quite regularly. I could not imagine ordering my cards from any other service. They are that good.

Oh, and to make this post less bland, here's a photo of the end result. The cards are a bit "stubbier" than in the initial layout but I can definitely live with that. I guess that had something to do with the fact I used American standard instead of European one. There appears to be a minor difference in their ratio.